How To...Do Away With FS2002 Pinkmania

By Ulrich Klein

Guess what? A fata morgana? Not at all, I trace the effect back to the many hours I spent flying with FS2002 during the last few weeks. Perhaps we have almost got accustomed to the pinkish glow that covers most of the cockpit panels at dusk and night time, which is kinda goofy, and I found it increasingly nagging the other day. Heck, it should be possible to do far better, I thought. So I made up my mind to lend the cockpits more realistic night lighting characteristics. I must admit, however, that I have no clear memory of what the instruments and panels in some particular aircraft actually look like at night time, and, what is more, I haven't sat in all of the cockpits that FS2002 offers to us, but I can't get rid of the feeling that most cockpits in FS2002 don't look right when it comes to terms with night lighting effects.

Eeek! Going back to the time when FS98 was still the wave of the time, I am reminded of the silly red glow on all the FS98 panels. In FS2000 night lighting on the panels was partly not really representative of what the real planes have but certainly a big improvement over its predecessor.

Screen shot of FS98 737 cockpit at night with a silly red glow all over it

Screen shot of FS2000 C182S cockpit with luminous instrument gauges at night

Please note that all the screen shots in this article can't do full justice to the real impression you get when watching the monitor. Who remembers that due to a bug or simply because MS had forgotten to implement the feature, the cockpits could not be sufficiently lighted at night, whereas the background of the panel was so dim that we had to partially turn up the brightness on our monitors to see all the switches. Heck, no pink glow though. Basically the only things that glowed were the instruments, at least the luminous ones. On the whole that looked pretty good for the time being, and this limited way of night lighting was definitely not the biggest issue of this daunting version.

A little more than a year ago FS2002 turned smiles on those who had had such a frustrating time with FS2000. What pleased me most were the enhanced possibilities of modifying the panels and, first of all of course, their refined look. Flying at night became a fine cinema with regard to the atmosphere mainly created by the cockpit panels and, needless to say, by what you saw when looking out of the cockpit. I did my first flight in the Learjet with FS2002, and I still remember the beauty of a night approach to the Bermuda Islands.

Screen shots of a Learjet Bermuda night approach and of a night trip with the DC-3 Gooney Bird

As a sunset junkie the overall purple glow on the panel did not bother me at the beginning, but in the course of time I increasingly doubted that this is as real as it gets. Another nostalgic night flight with the famous MAAM NATS R4D-6 (DC-3) convinced me that the night lighting characteristics of the panels can be changed and improved for sure. A close look into the panel.cfg file of the default Lear 45 reveals how to do away with the nagging pink glow, whose intensity slightly varies from panel to panel indeed. We open this .cfg file by Windows Notepad or similar and scroll right down to the end where we should find the [color] section. RGB colors are specified for day, night and for luminous instruments. It takes a bit of trying and testing to finally find out which set of entries for each of the three suits best. Within certain limits this is a matter of your personal liking. I have added descriptive notes in the lines to make it quite clear what has been changed and which entries are default.

Screen shots of the Learjet 45's panel.cfg file and of the effect the change has for its panel: the pink glow is gone. The overall panel background has been dimmed for better realism. Note that lines beginning with a semicolon are deactivated, and the double slash separates the command line from descriptive remarks which are then ignored by FS.

And this is how it works: the command "NIGHT=120,90,50" (without quotes of course if you type these values into the panel.cfg text file) means that FS will choose a value of 120 for red, a value of 90 for green, and 50 for blue (RGB color palette) at night. Basically values between 000 and 255 are valid, with 000 for black and 255 for white color. The command line "Luminous=220,200,100" (again without quotes) refers to instruments which are defined as luminous gauges, i.e. internally lighted instruments which shine by themselves. A cluster of values like 255,0,0 would make them glow extremely red, as it was inevitably the case with this sort of instruments in FS2000. Here, in FS2002, you have the possibility of selecting more moderate colors that better meet your personal taste. A good method to save time in finding out the right three values for the color you want to achieve is to use MS Paint (integrated part of the Windows OS). Open the program and select the color menu where it is possible to add new colors to the color palette. On the right side you will see the three RGB values of the color you have mixed there. Take these values if you think you have defined a proper color and enter them into the command line that you intend to change. Save the panel.cfg text file but leave it open in case you want to make further fine tuning with these values. You can have FS open all the time while you are doing all this but you will have to load another aircraft first and then reload the former aircraft (belonging to the modified panel.cfg) in order to make the changes take effect.

RGB color palette in MS Paint: I have selected a color that should simulate instruments internally lighted by yellowish bulbs (left side). In the 737-400 panel both the NIGHT and LUMINOUS values have been modified to improve the night lighting characteristics (right side).

Well, so far not bad, right? But let me refer to two other panels to show that the final test if the color has rightly been chosen, always is to look at the modified panels in FS itself and not in MS Paint. This is necessary because one and the same color may look slightly different in two panels, and because it is also important whether you deal with a panel with or without luminous instruments.

The C172SP panel (left side) is non-luminous while the C182 panel (right side) contains luminous instrument gauges, which results in a fairly different look and feel at dusk or night time. By the way, the luminous effect in the C172 panel can be restored if you want to have it that way. Just go to the [window00] section and change the command no_luminous=1 to no_luminous=0 or delete the whole command line altogether. That's all there is to it.

As you can see from the C172SP cockpit panel, all changes we make in the [color] section of the panel.cfg file also take immediate effect on any other panel window which is implemented in the panel config file of the plane, i.e. the radio stack, the GPS, the throttle quadrant, the annunciator, the overhead and the compass panel windows. E.g., in the above screen shot of the C172 panel you will find that the frame of the GPS panel window has adapted to the modified night color of the main panel background.

And here are further screen shots of modified FS2002 cockpits without that nagging pinkish glow:

King 350 cockpit panel: See the difference between the left and the right side of the screen shot? I have mixed the two sides of the panel in one shot: the left one showing the default panel color, the right side reveals the effect of my changes in the panel.cfg file. The obtrusive pink glow on the panel background has largely vanished, which really suits my eyes now. If you think it's still too much, well, now you know how to modify panel colors. Feel free to do so then.

I have packed the codes of all the modifications I made to the panel.cfg files into a zip file that can be downloaded right here. It also contains the original .cfg files and a lot more, so if for any reason you may want to "go back", it will be easy to do so.

Gosh, FS2002's pinkmania has really faded away and I am on extremely good terms with these modified night colors now and wouldn't like to miss them any more. I hope that especially the new look and feel gives you a lot of pleasure, too, but basically it's with a simulator that has turned heads, right?

Happy flying and safe landings!

Ulrich Klein
huki.klein@t-online.de